That problem is fairly widespread and well documented, and is significant even when threads are only 100-150 posts long; but the LEO team has seemed unable to address it so far.

The 300-post limit, in contrast, isn't really a serious problem, since anyone can always start a continuation thread on the same topic. If you think there's interest in Merkwürdige Familiennamen 2, you could start it yourself. Just be sure to link to the previous one. (-:

The length of one thread will normally not have an effect on the speed of "LEO".

But when there are a considerable amount of threads, read simultaneously by many people, it means that somewhere, something is to dig out of a database one threat at a time and to deliver it to a software-system which will create representations of each of those threads to be send out somewhere over the internet.

A considerable amount of huge threads will in consequence have an effect on the speed of "LEO".

Actually, I think I understand it now. The reason is simply that it takes longer for a website to format and display a long page than a short page.

Presumably the LEO software stores messages in the form of a structured database, not as an already-formatted web page. So order to create the page in HTML format for a user's browser to display, the LEO software needs to retrieve individual messages from the database and format them. And of course, that takes longer for a long thread than a shorter.

The full page would be 37 pages, if printed. The HTML is about 360K (97 pages if printed). These are quite large for a single web page, and particularly on slow computers, everything adds up.

I agree that a big computer (LEO's computer) can do this all quickly. But we don't really have any good estimates of the size of LEO's servers, or what's the processing demand - how many simultaneous users, how many requests per second, what other jobs are running on the same computer. Possibly all that, added together, might slow things down noticeably in times of heavy volume.